Assessment

MyCQ cognitive assessment provides your employees with a personalised report explaining their latest assessment performance in the five cognitive domains, their performance over time based on previous assessments and what this means for them in clear down to earth language. It also enables personalised set up of the AquaSnap training game for users and signposts them to the next step education components of the MyCognition PRO programme.

The individual tests that comprise MyCQ are revised and digitally delivered versions of paper and pencil tests commonly employed in the assessment of human cognition which have an extensive validation history.

MyCQ test

Principal cognitive domains measured

Paper and pencil equivalent

Simple Reaction Time

Processing Speed

Donders Type A (1869)

Choice Reaction Time

Attention

Donders Type B (1869)

2-Back

Working Memory

Kirchner N-back test (1958)

Visual recognition memory

Episodic memory

Benton Visual Retention Test (1945)

Trail Making B

Executive Function

Trail Making Test (1944)

The Five Cognitive Domains

1. Processing Speed is the coordination of cognitive process and a reaction or action. It is the degree of skill demonstrated by a person in completing a task. With increasing complexity, processing performance progresses from a simple innate reflex response, through simple to complext behaviours.

The Simple Reaction Time test in MyCognition’s MyCQ assesses processing speed and alertness by measuring the subject’s reaction time in front of stimulus which occurs intermittently.

2. Attention is the cognitive process of concentrating on one or more thing in the environment while filtering or ignoring other information. Attention can be considered the selective aspect of perception, as it has strong links with processes like seeing (visual) and hearing (auditory). In one form or another, attention is involved in almost all other cognitive domains (excluding tasks performed automatically). Thus, any decline in attention can affect many aspects of independent and effective daily functioning.

The Choice Reaction Time test in MyCognition’s MyCQ assesses divided attention, in addition to processing speed and alertness, by measuring the choice reaction time in front of two different stimuli which appear intermittently.

3. Working Memory is the cognitive process of retention of a limited amount of information for a short time and its retrieval and use during this time. It is used to perform cognitive processes on the items that are temporarily stored in it. Working memory is involved in the processes that require reasoning, such as reading comprehension, writing, and mental calculation. It is also linked with the ability to make decisions and solve problems.

The 2-back test in MyCognition’s MyCQ is a variant of the classic N-back test assessing working memory span and information updating, by measuring the ability of quickly matching the picture showed with the picture showed two steps back in a sequence.

4. Episodic Memory is the cognitive process of remembering past events personally experienced at a specific time and place. This type of process allows, through a conscious awareness, an individual to remember previous experiences and to think about possible future experiences.

The Visual Recognition Memory test in MyCognition’s MyCQ is an assessment of the visual memory and learning processes concerning the encoding and the retrieving of visual information, by measuring the ability of remembering a set of pictures and recognising them in a new set.

5. Executive function is a set of cognitive processes that regulate, control, and manage a range of high-level cognitive domains, such as the planning, organisation, coordination, implementation, and evaluation of many non-routine activities. As such, executive function is the ability to strategically plan, act on the plan, and to change strategy if necessary. Executive functions may be considered as ‘supervisory’ cognitive processes because they involve higher-level organisation and execution of complex thoughts and behaviour.

The version B of the Trail Making test in MyCognition’s MyCQ is targeted to assess executive function in addition to attention, by measuring the subject’s ability in task switching and control in a task requiring to link numbers and letters in the correct order.

Quantification of results

For each of the tests a measure of latency, i.e. the user’s average reaction time, and accuracy, i.e. the percentage of correct answers, is recorded. Then, the system automatically combines these measures in real-time according to a recipe set by experts, in order to produce a score for each domain in a scale from 1 to 100, setting the mean at 50. In addition to the five domains’ score, an overall MyCQ score is calculated as an average of the five domains.

This allows to have an empirical measure of the overall individual cognitive fitness and to understand which cognitive domains show greater strengths or weaknesses, to address a more targeted intervention.

All the MyCQ subtests resulted significantly correlated with the Cambridge Neuropsychological Automated Test Battery (CANTAB), one of the most well validated, reliable, and word-wide professionally adopted tools to assess cognition. This reinforces the assumption, based on experts’ design, that MyCQ is a clinically valid tool to identify the cognitive constructs, which it aims to assess.

The results of MyCQ have been normalised by age group based on the large amount of data collected by the system (almost 6000 assessments completed). The validity and statistical significance of the relative view of an individual’s scores vs its reference group increases every day together with new data collected from each MyCQ completed.